Tag Archive | "Conversations"

“By 2020, the average person will have more conversations with their bot than with their spouse.”

True, or false? You may be surprised to learn that speaking more with bots than our spouse is precisely what Gartner is predicting.

And when Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg says “messaging is one of the few things that people do more than social networking,” it requires no leap of faith to see that chatbots are an integral part of marketing’s future.

But you don’t need to stock up on canned peaches and head for the hills because “the robots are coming.” The truth is, the robots aren’t coming because they’re already here, and they love us from the bottom of their little AI-powered hearts.

Bots aren’t a new thing for many parts of the world such as China or India. As reported by Business Insider, sixty-seven percent of consumers worldwide have used a chatbot for customer support in the last year.

Within the United States, an impressive 60% of millennials have used chatbots with 70% of those reporting positive experiences, according to Forbes.

There’s no putting bots back in the box.

And it’s not just that brands have to jump on board to keep up with those pesky new generations, either. Bots are great for them, too.

Bots offer companies:

A revolutionary way to reach consumers. For the first time in history, brands of any size can reach consumers on a personal level. Note my emphasis on “of any size.” You can be a company of one and your bot army can give your customers a highly personal experience. Bots are democratizing business!

Snackable data. This “one-to-one” communication gives you personal insights and specificity, plus a whole feast of snackable data that is actionable.

Non-robot-like interaction. An intelligent bot can keep up with back-and-forth customer messages in a natural, contextual, human way.

Savings. According to Juniper Research, the average time saving per chatbot inquiry compared to traditional call centers is over four minutes, which has the potential to make a truly extraordinary impact on a company’s bottom line (not to mention the immeasurable impact it has on customers’ feelings about the company).

Always on. It doesn’t matter what time zone your customer is in. Bots don’t need to sleep, or take breaks. Your company can always be accessible via your friendly bot.

Here in the West, we are still in the equivalent of the Jurassic Period for bots. What they can be used for is truly limited only by our imagination.

One of my most recent favorites is an innovation from the BBC News Labs and Visual Journalism teams, who have launched a bot-builder app designed to, per Nieman Lab, “make it as easy as possible for reporters to build chatbots and insert them in their stories.”

So, in a story about President Trump from earlier this year, you see this:

It’s one of my favorites not just because it’s innovative and impressive, but because it neatly illustrates how bots can add to and improve our lives… not steal our jobs.

Don’t be a dinosaur

A staggering eighty percent of brands will use chatbots for customer interactions by 2020, according to research. That means that if you don’t want to get left behind, you need to join the bot arms race right now.

“But where do I start?” you wonder.

I’m happy you asked that. Building a bot may seem like an endeavor that requires lots of tech savvy, but it’s surprisingly low-risk to get started.

Many websites allow you to build bots for free, and then there’s QNAMaker.ai (created by Microsoft, my employer), which does a lot of the work for you.

You simply input your company’s FAQ section, and it builds the foundation for an easy chatbot that can be taken live via almost any platform, using natural language processing to parse your FAQ and develop a list of questions your customers are likely to ask.

This is just the beginning — the potential for bots is wow-tastic.

That’s what I’m going to show you today — how you can harness bot-power to build strong, lasting relationships with your customers.

Your 3-step plan to make conversations convert

Step 1: Find the right place to start

The first step isn’t to build a bot straightaway. After all, you can build the world’s most elaborate bot and it is worth exactly nothing to you or your customer if it does not address their needs.

That’s why the first step is figuring out the ways bots can be most helpful to your customers. You need to find their pain points.

You can do this by pretending you’re one of your customers, and navigating through your purchase funnel. Or better again, find data within your CRM system and analytics tools that can help you answer key questions about how your audience interacts with your business.

Here’s a handy checklist of questions you should get answers to during this research phase:

How do customers get information or seek help from your company? ☑

How do they make a purchase? ☑

Do pain points differ across channels and devices? ☑

How can we reduce the number of steps in each interaction? ☑

Next, you’ll want to build your hypothesis. And here’s a template to help you do just that:

I believe [type of person] needs to solve [problem] which happens while [situation], which will allow them to [get value].

For example, you’re the manager of a small spa, whose biggest time-suck is people calling to ask simple questions, meaning other customers are on hold for a long time. If those customers can ask a bot these simple questions, you get three important results:

The hold time for customers overall will diminish

The customer-facing staff in your spa will be able to pay more attention to clients who are physically in front of them

Customers with lengthier questions will be helped sooner

Everybody wins.

Finally, now that you’ve identified and prioritized the situations where conversation can help, you’ll be ready to build a bot as well as a skill.

Wait a minute — what’s a skill in this context, and how do they relate to bots? Here’s a great explanation from Chris Messina:

A bot is an autonomous program on a network

A chatbot is a bot that uses human language to communicate

An AI assistant is a chatbot that performs tasks or services for an individual

A skill is a capability that an AI assistant can learn

Each of them can help look things up, place orders, solve problems, and make things happen easier, better, and faster.

Step 2: Add conversation across the entire customer journey

There are three distinct areas of the customer decision journey where bots and skills can make a big difference.

Bot as introducer

Bots can help your company by being present at the very first event in a purchase path.

Adidas did this wonderfully when they designed a chatbot for their female-focused community Studio LDN, to help create an interactive booking process for the free fitness sessions offered. To drive engagement further, as soon as a booking was made the user would receive reminders and messages from influencer fitness instructors.

The chatbot was the only way for people to book these sessions and it worked spectacularly well.

In the first two weeks, 2,000 people signed up to participate, with repeat use at 80%. Retention after week one was 60%, which the brand claims is far better compared to an app.

Adidas did something really clever. They advertised the bot across many of their other channels to help promote the bot and help with its discoverability.

You can do the same.

There are countless examples where bots can put their best suit on and act as the first introduction to your company:

Email marketing: According to MailChimp research, the average email open rates are between 15% to 26% with click rates being just a fraction of that at approximately 2%–5%. That’s pretty low when you compare that to Messenger messages, which can have an open rate of well over 90%. Why not make your call-to-action within your email be an incentive for people to engage with your chatbot? For example, something like “message us for 10% off” could be a compelling reason for people to engage with your chatbot.

Social media: How about instead of running Facebook ads which direct people to websites, you run an ad connecting people to bots instead? For example, in the ad, advise people to “chat to see the latest styles” or “chat now to get 20% off” and then have your bot start a conversation. Instant engagement! Plus, it’s a more gentle call-to-action as opposed to a hard sell such as “buy now.”

Video: How about creating instructional YouTube videos on how to use your bot? Especially helpful since one of the barriers to using this new technology is a lack of awareness about how to use it. A short, quick video that demonstrates what your skill can do could be very impactful. Check out this great example from FitBit and Cortana:

Search: As you’ve likely seen by now, Bing has been integrating chatbots within the SERPs itself. You can do a search for bots across different platforms and you’ll be able to add relevant bots directly to your preferred platform right from the search results themselves:

You can engage with local businesses such as restaurants via the Bing Business bot that shows up as part of the local listings:

The key lesson here is that when your bot is acting as an introducer, give your audience plenty of ways and reasons to chat. Use conversation to tell people about new stuff, and get them to kick off that conversation.

Bot as influencer

To see a bot acting as an effective influencer, let’s turn to Chinese giant Alibaba. They developed a customizable chatbot store concierge that they offer free to brands and markets.

Cutely named dian xiao mi, or “little shop bee,” the concierge is designed to be the most helpful store assistant you could wish for.

For example, if a customer interacting with a clothing brand uploads a photograph of a t-shirt, the bot buzzes in with suggestions of pants to match. Or, if a customer provides his height and weight, the bot can offer suggested sizing. Anyone who has ever shopped online for clothing knows exactly how much pain the latter offering could eliminate.

This helpful style is essentially changing the conversation from “BUY NOW!” to “What do you need right now?”

We should no longer ask: “How should we sell to customers?” The gazillion-dollar question instead is: How can we connect with them?

An interesting thing about this change is that, when you think about it for a second, it seems like common sense. How much more trust would you have for a brand that was only trying to help you? If you bought a red dress, how much more helpful would it be if the brand showed you a pic of complementary heels and asked if you want to “complete the look”?

For the chatbot to be truly helpful as an influencer, it needs to learn from each conversation. It needs to remember what you shared from the last conversation, and use it to shape future conversations.

So, say a chatbot from my favorite shoe store knew all about my shoe addiction (is there a cure? Would I event want to be cured of it?), then it could be more helpful via its remarketing efforts.

Imagine how much more effective it would be if we could have an interaction like this:

Shoestore Chatbot: Hi Purna! We’re launching a new collection of boots. Would you like a sneak peek?

Me: YES please!!!

Shoestore Chatbot: Great! I’ll email pics to you. You can also save 15% off your next order with code “MozBlog”. Hurry, code expires in 24 hours.

Me: *buys all the shoes, obvs*

This is Bot-topia. Your brand is being helpful, not pushy. Your bot is cultivating relationships with your customers, not throwing ads at them.

The key lesson here? For your bot to be a successful influencer, you must always consider how they can be helpful and how they can add value.

Bot as closer

Bot: “A, B, C. Always be closing.”

Imagine you want to buy flowers for Mother’s Day, but you have very little interest in flowers, and when you scroll through the endless options on the website, and then a long checkout form, you just feel overwhelmed.

1-800-Flowers found your pain point, and acted on it by creating a bot for Facebook Messenger.

It asks you whether you want to select a bunch from one of their curated collections, instantly eliminating the choice paralysis that could see consumers leave the website without purchasing anything.

And once you’ve chosen, you can easily complete the checkout process using your phone’s payment system (e.g. Apple Pay) to make checkout a cinch. So easy, and so friction-free.

The result? According to Digiday, within two months of launch the company saw 70% of the orders through the bot came from brand-new customers. By building a bot, 1-800 Flowers slam-dunked their way into the hearts of a whole new, young demographic.

Can you think of a better, more inexpensive way to unlock a big demographic? I can’t.

To quote Mr. Zuckerberg again: “It’s pretty ironic. To order from 1-800-Flowers, you never have to call 1-800-Flowers again.”

Think back to that handy checklist of questions from Step 1, especially this one: “How can we reduce the number of steps in each interaction?”

Your goal is to make every step easy and empathetic.

Think of what people would want/need to know to as they complete their tasks. For example, if you’re looking to transfer money from your bank account, the banking chatbot could save you from overdraft fees if it warns you that your account could be overdrawn before you make the transfer.

The key lesson here: Leverage your bots to remove any friction and make the experience super relevant and empathetic.

Step 3: Measure the conversation with the right metrics

One of my favorite quotes around how we view metrics versus how we should view metrics comes from Automat CEO Andy Mauro, who says:

“Rather than tracking users with pixels and cookies, why not actually engage them, learn about them, and provide value that actually meets their needs?”

Again, this is common sense once you’ve read it. Of course it makes sense to engage our users and provide value that meets their needs!

We can do this because the bots and skills give us information in our customers’ own words.

Here’s a short list of KPIs that you should look at (let’s call it “bot-alytics”):

Delivery and open rates: If the bot starts a conversation, did your customer open it?

Click rates: If your bot delivered a link in a chat, did your customer click on it?

Retention: How often do they come back and chat with you?

Top messages: What messages are resonating with your customers more than others?

Conversion rates: Do they buy?

Sentiment analysis: Do your customers express happiness and enthusiasm in their conversation with the bot, or frustration and anger?

Using bot-alytics, you can easily build up a clear picture of what is working for you, and more importantly, what is working for your customer.

And don’t forget to ask: What can you learn from bot-alytics that can help other channels?

The future’s bright, the future’s bots

What were once dumb machines are now smart enough that we can engage with them in a very human way. It presents the opportunity of a generation for businesses of all shapes and sizes.

Our customers are beginning to trust bots and digital personal assistants for recommendations, needs, and more. They are the friendly neighborhood machines that the utopian vision of a robotic future presents. They should be available to people anywhere: from any device, in any way.

And if that hasn’t made you pencil in a “we need to talk about bots” meeting with your company, here’s a startling prediction from Accenture. They believe that in five years, more than half of your customers will select your services based on your AI instead of your traditional brand.

In three steps, you can start your journey toward bot-topia and having your conversations convert. What are you waiting for?

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With personalization and (not provided) keywords, there’s been plenty of debate in recent months over the value of keyword rankings in today’s world of marketing. It’s important to remember, though, that there are many ways of showing success without even mentioning keyword rankings.

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Dana DiTomaso tells us about a few important conversations we can have regardless of our (or our clients’) opinions on rank reports.

Conversations that Don’t Involve Rank Reports – Whiteboard Friday

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard:

Video transcription

Howdy Moz fans. I’m not Rand today. I’m Dana DiTomaso from Kick Point, and I presented at MozCon about next-level local SEO tactics. One of the things that I talked about and one of the things people asked me about, I said, this was a little throwaway comment, “Don’t have conversations with your clients that end in rank reports, because it ends up in a bad conversation, and it focuses on the wrong kind of metric.” People at the party afterwards said to me, “That’s nice, Dana, but seriously we have clients, and they want rank reports. So what are we supposed to do?”

So today I am doing a Whiteboard Friday on conversations with clients that don’t end in a rank report, because I feel like this is a really important way for our industry to move. It’s a really important conversation you need to learn how to have, and if you come armed with all this stuff, when you go meet with a client, eventually when you get to the end and you drag them through this process, they’re going to love you forever. I promise. I promise. If it doesn’t work, then I will send you Smarties, which are delicious chocolate treats from Canada. I promise, just e-mail me.

So we’re going to start with things that we talk to clients about when we start working with them. The first thing is I say to them, “How much new business do you want?” Before they say to me, “Oh, I’m not showing up in the map, or I’m not ranking for these phrases,” I say, “How much new business can your company take in, say, the next month?”

These are actually real numbers from one of our real clients. So this isn’t me just making up some crap. So they said to me, “I can take 200 new customers.” It’s a service-based business. So they really do have an upper ceiling on how much new business they can take before they run out of people and they have to hire again. Okay, so 200.

Now I say, “So how many calls and people walking in,” and it’s a medical industry. It’s not a lot of people who walk in, but they mostly get phone calls. How many new calls do they get now? They said, “Well, we track.”
They’re good at tracking. If your client isn’t good at tracking, then get them good at tracking. Then they say, “Okay, we got a 148 calls now.”

So I know that from the number of people who sign up with them, I say, “How many people who call actually make an appointment?” They say, “Well, it’s about 80%.” Okay, so that means that you have 118 new leads.

Okay, so you have 118 new leads that you get, and they look in their numbers and they say, “Yeah, that seems about right. That seems cool.” So then I take a look at their website visits for the previous month, for the previous time period, unique, not all visitors, just unique visitors, and I say, “This is how many you unique visitors you got. It was 3,904. So that means that you have about a 3% conversion rate from the number of people who go to your website to the number of people who sign up for your stuff.”

So now we have a number that we can work with. Then I say, “Okay, so if you want to hit 200 pieces of new business, that means that you have to get 250 calls or walk-ins”âperhaps another business, not this oneâ”which means that you need to get 6,700 visits to your website.”

So this is when we say, “Based on the amount of budget that you’d like to give with us, we don’t recommend that you’re going to hit this number in this first month.” So then we can figure out a plan with them and say,
“Okay, so next month we’re going to start with PPC. We’re going to do some AdWords, because that’s going to convert really well for you, and you really want to get new business in right away. So let’s do some AdWords.”

Then the next month, we’re working on the map stuff in the meantime, and then we can create a plan for them on when we think we’re going to hit these 6,700 visits, when we think that number’s going to happen. Then they know how many months to expect of return.

Then we can also find out from them, “How much is each one of these 118 people worth to you? How much are you willing to spend per lead to get those people in the door?” Then you can also take the math and break that out and determine your ROI for your business. So if you charge them a certain amount each month, which is how we do it, it’s a monthly retainer type project, then we know the exact ROI and the exact cost per lead. So we can say to the client, “Hey, we’re actually making you money.” Then they just keep paying the bills because we’re actually making them money. We’re not costing them any money.

The second part of this is what you report on. So how do you get to these 6,700 visits? We break out all of our reports into five channels. We say how much organic traffic you got, how much paid, how much referral, how much social, how much direct. We show them just the unique visitor counts, and then we try to break down the conversions, although not every website has strong conversions.

Sometimes we can’t say, “Okay, you got X number of calls via social.” We don’t necessarily know that. If we have call tracking set up, we can tell some of that. But it’s not foolproof, obviously, like maybe somebody came via your Facebook page, and then they bookmarked the site, and then they called later. So of course it’s only going to reflect as a social visit, but whatever. So that’s why these raw numbers are so important. You can’t track everything, but you can try to track most of the things.

The other part of social, specifically, actually is a lot of really small businesses say, “Yeah, this social thing, I don’t understand. It’s boring, it’s stupid, and only kids are on Facebook. My clients aren’t on Facebook, and I don’t need social.” So we start reporting on social, and there’s a really nice piece of regex that you can use to break out your social visits. Do not include them in the referral traffic. Make sure to break them out as their own separate channel.

Make sure that when you report on social, if you’re getting a lot of social visits, just tell them about it and say, “Hey, I know you’re not doing anything on social right now, but you’re getting a lot of social traffic.”
Or maybe if they’re a home builder, for example, maybe they’re getting Pinterest traffic, or from House.com, which is new house new social network. You say to them, “I know you’re not on any of these places, but people are already coming to your website from it, and they’re converting. So maybe we can put some effort in. Just imagine the amount of business that you would get.” You say, “It would be this much extra each month for us to help you with your social strategies.” This is a good business development tip for you.

Then the last thing that pulls all of this together, and this is another throwaway in my presentation, a lot of people say, “Well, advertising agencies, how do I work with these people?” Part of it is just helping them be better at their job and helping them show that what they’re doing is actually making money.

So you don’t want to go into a client and say, “That advertising company you’re paying all that money to, that stuff is crap. Forget them. You’ve got to go with this SEO stuff instead.” Then you make enemies instead of making friends.

So what we do is we say, “Tell us about all the advertising you’re doing right now, all your print ads, all your radio. Who is doing it? How are you tracking it?” They’ll say, “Well, we have a print ad in the local newspaper, and we do a radio ad on this radio station, which is right in with our demographic.” ‘I’ll say, “That’s great. What I would like to do is I would like to put some call tracking around that, so when you have the ad, and this is, ‘We’re awesome, you should call us, visit our awesomecompany.com, or call number,’” instead it would say, “Visit our awesomecompany.com/radio station name, or this magical call tracking number.”

So people do call from radio. I know they’re usually in their car, totally breaking the law that you’re not supposed to use your cell phones. But they do call. If they visit the website, set up a landing page. It doesn’t have to be like a crazy PPC landing page, where you rip out the navigation and everything else. Just a landing page that says, “Hey, radio station listener.”

In our hometown we have Sonic, so if it’s like our awesomecompany.com/sonic, that’s like a new alternative rock station. So if they visit Sonic, then we know the type of listener who’s coming, and then we can write the content in a way that makes sense to that listener. We know how the DJs are on that radio station, so we can match the tone of the content to match the tone of the person who probably came because they heard the ad on Sonic. We know you’re not listening to classical. You’re listening to Pearl Jam. So we know the kind of music that you like, what type of person that you are, and we can write that content for you. It says basically, “Howdy, Sonic listener, here’s the stuff that we think you should know in order to call. Here’s the information you want to arm yourself with. Hey, give us a call, or fill out this form.” There’s your conversion tactic there. So we can see how many visits we got to that web page.

Then what you do is you talk to your radio rep or your media buyer, or whoever else the client is working with, and you say, “Can I get the media blocking chart?” This tells you when the ad is running. If it’s from the radio station, for example, they can tell you after it’s been done or what hours it was played in. So maybe they decided to only run the ad from 4:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., for example. Then in that case, you can take a look at your analytics on an hourly basis and compare: Did we get more direct and organic visitsâthis is typically the two that radio converts toâduring those times?

You can’t tell with a direct visit if they didn’t go to that fancy URL, if they just typed in the main URL, or if they organically typed in the name of your client and then went to the site. So maybe it’s a brand new visit. More likely it’s just not provided for this particular client, where these numbers in the example, they’re actually up to 50% of not provided now, and I think it’s just a lot of cell phone visits.

So we take a look at these metrics. We compare it to the hours in their media blocking chart, and then we know approximately how much benefit they’re receiving as a result of radio. Then you look good, because you’re able to take an offline piece of advertising and turn it into an online metric, that is a conversion metric for the client, and the radio station looks great, because, “Hey, look at this, now we actually know how much benefit you’re getting from radio, which is a really difficult thing.”

Then because the radio station likes you, radio station reps are actually super friendly. You should make friends with them. They usually have like free swags and stuff and tickets to things. But the other thing is that they work with a lot of small businesses who first turn to radio. They’re not calling you, they’re calling the radio station because they think radio works, and for some clients it does. It really depends.

But that radio rep will say, “Hey, do you have a website? We want to mention your website in the ad.” The company will say, “No, I don’t know about this web thing.” The radio station will say, “I’m working with this amazing company, and they have done this great tracking for one of our other clients, and look at what they’ve done, and look at the stuff they can report on.” They’ll say, “That’s amazing. I clearly need to spend all my money on these services, except for the money we’re going to spend on radio.” Then you get new business out of it.

Somebody asked on the last day, “How do you get a seat at the table with the advertisers?” It’s by playing nice with them. It’s by saying to them, “Look, I know that you can’t do this level of tracking with the offline advertising to the actual leads, but I bet you can, and I’m going to teach you how. But I’m also going to show everything and how it relates to the client, all the pieces and how it all comes together.” Then when you, as the business, as your consultant, when you report on this, that turns into this complete marketing reporting for the client, and they love this. They get really excited about it. Like when I give a client a report and I say, “Look at this, your cost per lead went down two bucks,” that’s really exciting for a client.” They think, “Wow, this company is making even more money for me. What would happen if I gave them more money? Then what happens when I refer my friends to them to make more business?” It’s a way to make a rapport that turns into a business building tactic for you.

I hope you find this helpful. Again, if you didn’t, e-mail me and I’ll give you some Smarties. Thanks.

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Even for the marketers who understand social media is a conversation, it’s so frustrating to deal with social spam. To help you deal with social spam in your own social media marketing efforts, I talked to a few experts in the field.Marketingsherpa Blog

My favorite unicorns and rainbows myth to pick on is “engage in the conversation.” While it can be useful for customer service, from a results-driven marketing perspective, I believe conversations aren’t very important.

To continue proving that point, I analyzed comment, view and link data on over 100,000 blog posts. What I found may surprise some.

There is no correlation between the number of comments on a post and the number of views that post got. There’s also no correlation between comments and the number of links that post got. There is some positive correlation between views and links. To view the linear correlation and scatter-plot data see the graphs below.

With your blog, comments should not be a goal. They don’t lead to views or links, which is what leads to actual revenue. Enagaging in the conversation doesn’t work.

The correlation numbers in the above graphic are linear regressions. The scatter plots are shown on double logrithmic scales to show that there is no non-linear correlations in the data.